Pakistan’s governance crisis demands administrative reform

Pakistan’s recurring debate over creating new provinces is too often reduced to questions of ethnicity, language and political bargaining. That framing obscures the real issue. The challenge is not how many provinces Pakistan should have, but whether its governance architecture has kept pace with the country’s demographic and administrative transformation. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s recent call for additional administrative units has revived a politically sensitive discussion. Predictably, much of the debate has centred on constitutional hurdles and fears of ethnic fragmentation. Yet the more important question is whether Pakistan can continue governing a population that has grown from roughly 65 million in the early 1970s to nearly 250 million today through an administrative structure that has changed remarkably little. Administrative […]